Technology Update

Data From Free Computer Labs Raise Privacy Concerns: A
company that places state-of-the-art computers in schools free of
charge—in exchange for the opportunity to expose students to
advertising—came under fire last week from a diverse coalition of
media and advocacy groups.

The coalition sent letters to all governors and chairmen of
education committees in state legislatures charging the San Ramon,
Calif.-based ZapMe! Corp. with invading students' privacy without the
permission of their parents. In addition, it sent letters to other
companies, including the Microsoft Corp. and Dell Computer Co., that
have partnerships with ZapMe!, urging them to break off relations with
ZapMe!

"ZapMe! violates the privacy of schoolchildren, misuses the schools
and compulsory-schooling laws to force children to watch ads during
school time, and degrades the moral authority of schools and teachers
by turning them into instruments of corporate advertising and
marketing," the letters contend.

Drafted by Gary Ruskin, the director of Commercial Alert, a
Washington-based group that monitors advertising, the letters call for
state laws requiring companies to seek parental consent before
gathering personal information about children.

Bills for a similar law at the federal level were introduced in both
chambers of Congress last fall and have been referred to committees.
California passed such a law last year.

Schools that sign contracts with ZapMe! receive free computer labs
of from five to 15 computers with high-speed Internet connections,
along with technical support. In return, they agree to have the
computers used for at least four hours each day and permit ads to be
flashed in a corner of the computers' screens. Student computer users
are each assigned an electronic identification, and schools provide
ZapMe! with their ages and gender, but not their names, addresses, or
phone numbers, according to ZapMe!

The company, which was launched in 1998 and began selling stock to
the public in October, has contracts with 6,000 schools, involving more
than a million students.

While the ZapMe! business model is not illegal, Mr. Ruskin said, it
is "irredeemable." Although ZapMe! doesn't provide actual names of
students to advertisers, he said, the company gets "a tremendously
valuable stream of advertising and market research information on
students."

Rick Inatome, the chief executive officer
of ZapMe!, disputed any charges that his company is invading the
privacy of students. He emphasized that the company deliberately asks
schools not to turn over students' personal information.

"We ask the school to provide broad demographic data about who is
using the [Internet] space at any time," he said. He explained the
company doesn't turn over to advertisers individual profiles on
students even without their names, but only "insight into what types of
people have viewed their ad in a broad demographic reach."

The advertising aspect of ZapMe! stirred debate in the Hartford,
Conn., area last year when the school board of the 8,500-student
Bristol district decided to accept computers from the company.

In the end, said Rich Gagliardi, the district's director of
technology, "the technology committee felt the exposure to advertising
in the ZapMe! computers was no different than using a commercial search
engine." He said that while questions were raised about collection of
information on students, school officials believed that ZapMe!'s
gathering of demographic data was "reasonable and not an
intrusion."

In North Carolina, however, the 9,000-student Chapel Hill-Carrboro
city school district rejected an opportunity to sign a contract with
ZapMe! last year, said Neil G. Pederson, the superintendent of the
district. School leaders were willing to accept students' exposure to
advertising, but objected to an option on the ZapMe! screen for
students to click on a button that took them to a virtual shopping
mall—called ZapMall—that catered to their age group.

"What bothered us was that there was a level of enticement for
students to engage in e-commerce," Mr. Pederson said. "We wanted the
computers used for academic purposes."

One signer of the letter criticizing ZapMe! said she did so because
of her general concern about increasing commercialism in schools.

Diane E. Levin, a professor of education at Wheelock College in
Boston, said she was worried that more and more funding for schools is
coming from corporations that "are trying to figure out ways to try to
make money off of children."

Civic Commitment: The city of Birmingham, Ala., is winning
praise from local school leaders for its decision to help underwrite
education technology.

The city is paying $30 million of the $52 million price tag to bring
Internet access and up-to-date computers to the 75 schools in the
Birmingham district. District officials say the schools will soon be
transformed from having limited numbers of outdated computers to having
three new computers with Internet access per classroom, plus a laptop
for every teacher and administrator.

"It's unusual to receive such giant support from a city in relation
to the operation of a school district program," said Johnny E. Brown,
the superintendent of Birmingham schools. The commitment, he said,
shows that the community is concerned that its young people might end
up on the wrong side of the "digital divide" between better-off and
poorer families in access to computer technology.

Ninety-five percent of the district's 38,000 students are
African-American, and 80 percent qualify for free or reduced-price
lunches.

The superintendent credits the city's pledge to finance the
technology, made in 1998, with putting the district in a favorable
light to receive grants from the federal government's E-rate program.
Subsidies under the education-rate program help pay to connect schools
to the Internet, but not for computers or teacher training. The
district has received $18.4 million through that program.

This month, the Birmingham school board approved a $25 million
contract with Compaq Computer Corp. that will use most of the
technology funding from the city to place thousands of computers in the
hands of teachers and students. The money will pay for more than 8,000
desktop computers, 2,400 laptops, and 2,300 printers, plus software,
training, and technical support.

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